I never thought doing the act with Jimmy would be a way to get out of the army. I just thought of it as a way to make my time in the army more interesting. However, once we were in Washington, we found ourselves performing for the secretary of defense. I had only two months left on my two-year service contract. Jimmy and I did our routine in the All-World event, and we came in third as a specialty group in the nonmusical grand finals of 1958. We celebrated, and then they offered us the opportunity to continue in an army show called Rolling Along, which would tour all over Europe. The catch was that I had to sign up for another two years of service.
Although I liked performing, I did not want to do two more years in the army. I was just months from getting out, and I wanted to be done and go home. When I declined, I think they didn’t see the point of sending me back to Korea, so I was restationed to Fort Belvoir in Alexandria, Virginia. At my new post I met Barry Kurtz, who was a good basketball player from Hostra University. Barry helped me get on a basketball team at Fort Bevoir, and I volunteered for the newspaper, where I wrote a sports column. I got up every day and wrote about national sports and played basketball. Not a bad job in the army during peacetime.
I wanted to get out of the army, but I have never been the best at navigating paperwork. One day on the basketball court I started talking to Barry Kurtz, who was the company clerk. Barry was an athletic con man always looking for a deal. He told me that because of my service and circumstances, if I filled out the right paperwork I could get out by springtime. So that’s what I did after two years of service. In the spring of 1959 Barry helped me fill out the proper forms and I was released. I grabbed my duffel bag, snare drum, and the plaque Jimmy and I had won, said goodbye to my friends, and headed off on the next train bound for New York City.
I arrived at Penn Station and then boarded another train for the Bronx. I got off at Bedford Park on 204th Street and walked the five blocks to my house. By the time I got home, dragging my duffel and drum, it was 11:00 P.M., but I remember feeling so happy to finally be home. I rang the bell of my apartment, and my mother and father opened the door to welcome me. Then Dad said, “It’s late. Go to bed,” and we all went to sleep. But as I got undressed in my room, with my dog tags and army uniform, there was only one thing on my mind: How was I going to make a living now? In the army, I could play sports, write articles, and perform music. But now, without the clear structure of camp or the army, I wasn’t sure where I fit in or who would pay me to fit in.
That night I lay awake looking at the sports stars who still lined the walls of my childhood room. It was obvious that a career as a professional athlete was still not a possibility for me, but maybe I could forge a career as a sportswriter. After all I did have a degree from Medill, Northwestern’s journalism school and one of the best. The problem was that most of the top-notch Medill graduates got sent right out of college to small-town newspapers in places like Boone, Iowa, and I didn’t really want to live in Boone, Iowa. So I came up with another plan. I would apply as a copyboy at the New York Daily News. I also decided that I would call my college writing partner Fred Freeman and tell him I was back in town, ready to write some new comedy material. I wasn’t sure whether journalism or comedy writing was going to be a profession for me, but I knew I had to try to make a living at something.
4. NEW YORK CITY
Writing for Stand-Up Comedians and Being Paid in Corn Beef
WHEN I CAME back from Korea I lived in my parents’ house in the Bronx and I was out of work for two weeks.
That was literally the only time in my life that I was unemployed against my will. I hated it. I felt lost. I didn’t want to rely on my parents to support me, so I felt constant pressure to find work. I decided right away that the best road would be to get a newspaper job and save money by moving in with my writing partner Fred Freeman, who had an apartment in the East Village. I went to The New York Times and was told they wanted only journalism graduates from Ivy League schools. So I headed over to the Daily News, where I was hired right away. They didn’t even care where I went to journalism school. As long as I could carry a cup of coffee without spilling it, I could be a copyboy at the Daily News.
Fred worked for a vanity press called Exposition, which published writers’ books for a fee. He got paid a hundred dollars a week, compared to my thirty-eight dollars a week at the newspaper. With low-key day jobs, we both had time and energy to work on our comedy writing at night. Just as Fred had planned before I went to Korea, we put our heads together to write and sell jokes and sketch material to stand-up comedians. To make our venture professional, we had business cards printed up that read “Freeman & Marshall—Comedy Writers 100 percent Virgin Material.” We would go to nightclubs and hand out the cards to anyone who would take one. With my confidence from performing stand-up in the army, I began to step up to the mike in small New York nightclubs as well.
The story I told that got the most laughs was about how my first job straight out of college was as a fox-face stuffer in a factory that made ladies’ fur coats and stoles. The routine went something like this. “So in the factory the fox stoles would come to me and the foxes’ faces would be down and droopy because the fox was dead, of course. However, no fancy rich lady wants a droopy-nosed fox hanging down looking sad over her shoulder at a cocktail party. So my job would be to shove a piece of firm cardboard into the nose of each fox face to make it turn upward. So the cardboard would take each nose from droopy and sad to perky and fun. Women all over Manhattan were wearing perky-nosed fox stoles because of me.”
The truth was, that I never really worked as a fox-face stuffer. My friend Harvey Keenan from the Bronx did it, but it was such a funny story I put it into my act. He worked down in the Garment District for a company that sold fox stoles. And he really did shove a small piece of cardboard into the nose of each fox, and make it cute instead of droopy. I did a whole routine about stuffing the fox faces. And then I riffed on what it must have been like for my friend Harvey to pick up girls at bars with the line “I’m a fox-face stuffer. What do you do?” I got some big laughs with that routine, and I still perform it from time to time. It taught me an important lesson: You can hear a funny story from a friend and then make it your own.
Just as I had done in college and the army, I joined a band to make some side money. When you have a thirty-eight-dollar-a-week job, you need to make extra money. Jimmy Anglisano was back in New York, too, and we formed a group called the Mayfairs. We played in nightclubs all around Times Square. We hired a bass player named Richie McCormick, who had gone to Northwestern with me. Sometimes I would have to work late at the Daily News and then go right to my band job. So I taught my partner and roommate, Fred, how to set up my drum set so I could go straight from the newspaper to the nightclub and grab my drumsticks as the show started.
While back in New York, I reconnected with some of my childhood friends from the Bronx. Marty Garbus and Joel Sterns were both going to law schools nearby. I dated a raven-haired secretary named Sandy Brooks, whom we all called Babbling Brooks because she never stopped talking. Eventually Fred decided that he liked collaborating with me but not putting up with my late-night schedule or assembling the drum kit, so I moved out of his apartment into a five-floor walk-up on West Sixteenth Street. I lived there with Bob Brunner, another copyboy I met at the Daily News. Bob was a stocky, tough former high school football player with dark circles under his eyes. He would later become a top Hollywood comedy writer-producer. We split the rent of $150 a month. Carrying my snare drum, bass drum, tom-tom and cymbals up and down the five flights of stairs many nights was challenging, but I felt young and excited to be finally living on my own away from my parents.
Despite being the time when I gained my independence, which I cherished, this period in my life was when I struggled to find a way to support myself. On Mondays and Tuesdays, my days off from the Daily News, I could work on my comedy writing with Fred. Sometimes when I played in a nightclub as a drummer or stand-up, I
would pass other comedians jokes for free. Most of the time they liked my material and thanked me. But one time I passed a joke to a comic and he didn’t like the joke so he set it on fire and gave me my first flaming rejection.
Another place to sell material was a comedy hangout, the Stage Deli. Fred and I would go there and hand out jokes to the comedians as they ate lunch. We would write them on little slips of paper and give them to guys like Jack E. Leonard, Jack Carter, Joey Bishop, and Buddy Hackett. Although once in a while someone would pay us fifty or a hundred dollars for a page of jokes, most of the comedians just paid in food. They bought us sandwiches and called it even. When you are a young single guy without a family to support, living on corn beef sandwiches doesn’t seem so bad. It was exciting for us just to sit at a deli table with working comedians and talk about comedy.
To pay our rent, however, Fred and I found side jobs. We were freelance writers for Rogue magazine, a men’s magazine that ran features on food, entertainment, and world travel. A former teacher of mine named Frank Robinson was the editor, and he hired Fred and me to write reviews of movies, plays, and restaurants. Rogue paid ten dollars for each review, and we wrote a lot of them. We didn’t tell Frank, but most of the movies and plays we never saw, and the restaurants we never ate in. To save time and money, we would interview our friends and find out what movies and plays they had seen. And for restaurants we relied on several stewardesses who lived in my building. The girls told us about cafés and bistros in places such as Belgium and Austria, in colorful detail, from the appetizers right on through to dessert. Frank loved our pieces because we seemed so well-traveled. We worried all the time that our scheme would be uncovered, but the money was too good to turn down.
While our day jobs were fine, we both knew that we needed to get a lucky break in order to make a living as comedy writers. One day when we least expected it, our break came. Fred and I bumped into a guy coming out of an elevator named Muttle “Mutt” Tickner, who was friends with my army buddy Charlie Camilleri. Mutt, it turned out, worked as the receptionist at a management office called Berger, Ross and Steinman, which handled top comedians. Meeting dry-witted Mutt was the big break we had been waiting for.
Phil Foster was the first A-list comedian Mutt introduced us to. Phil was a mean-looking cross between a bouncer and a baseball catcher. He would also turn out to be a very loyal and charming man. Phil came to see me at a comedy club one night. When I finished my act, he said my material was great but my delivery was not as strong. So he suggested that I forget performing and stick to writing, which I did. He then invited us to his house to work for him, and he would say “Wake me when it’s funny,” and go into his room to take a nap. We would work on some material, and when it was ready we’d wake him up to review it. Phil was a great client to have because not only was he a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show, but he also had a radio show. We would write him routines and social commentary along the lines of Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes. Our relationship with Phil Foster opened doors to other comedians, such as Joey Bishop, a dead-pan somber-looking man who rarely seemed happy.
The day I went to have my first meeting with Joey Bishop, I handed him my diploma from Northwestern.
“What’s this?” he said.
“My college diploma,” I said. “I thought you would be impressed I have a writing degree.”
“Interesting. But write some jokes on the other side of it and then I’ll really be impressed.”
Joey was a big deal in comedy because he was a guest host on Jack Paar’s The Tonight Show. Phil convinced Joey that he should have his own writers for the show and that Fred and I would be perfect for the job. Joey agreed and paid us three hundred dollars a week, which we split. Suddenly, Fred and I were working as a television writing team for a comedian on The Tonight Show. Soon a man named Frank Cooper contacted us and said he wanted to represent us. Once you started making money back then, you didn’t need to look for an agent. Agents found you. That is still true today.
Writing material for Joey wasn’t an easy job. He was a comedian of few words and known as king of the deadpan. If a joke wasn’t working or didn’t get a laugh quickly, he would say “son of a gun,” which was his catchphrase. In the general scope of comedy, he was not as funny as Don Rickles and Jack Carter, but he was more connected. Stars like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin liked him and considered him a member of their Rat Pack. Joey’s style was unique. He liked to assume the part of the sullen Rat Pack comedian and often had the audiences overhear his jokes instead of hearing them dead-on. To achieve this, he would even perform with his back to the audience, playing his material directly to the band. What we found the most difficult to deal with was that he didn’t respect writers. He rarely introduced us formally. Among the staff of The Tonight Show, Fred and I were known as Joey’s Kids.
The first year we wrote for Joey whenever he substituted for Jack Paar, which was about seven times. The second year we signed with an agent who negotiated a deal for us to write for Jack Parr as well, full-time as staff writers. We joined Paul Keyes, Bob Howard, and Walter Kempley on the writing staff for The Tonight Show in 1960. We wrote about five pages of jokes each day, four days a week. Joey or Jack might use one or two of our jokes each day, and each time it felt like sweet victory to us. Jack was a paranoid yet dapper type with an obsessive curiosity about life. That’s what made him such a good talk-show host. We wrote jokes about being stuck in rush hour such as “Traffic was so heavy that I drove from Long Island to Manhattan in neutral.” Joey loved that joke and asked for more like it. Both he and Jack wanted material that appeared as if they had just thought of it spontaneously. One day Fred and I and the other three writers were standing in the hall talking. Jack saw us and looked annoyed. “Don’t bunch up,” he said. “I don’t want people to think I have so many writers.” Basically the comedians paid us to write funny material for them and remain anonymous.
One of the reasons the audience had an affinity for Jack was that he liked to tell stories about his family. However, one night his material backfired. He described how his daughter had just gotten her first training bra. His daughter, about twelve years old at the time, heard what he said and was mortified. That incident resonated with me. I vowed then and there that if I ever had children I would not embarrass them in public or on television. Jack defended his jokes because he said they were not only true but also funny. But to embarrass your child in the service of comedy didn’t seem right to me. Even if such a story was true, it caused too much hurt to be worth it.
The talent coordinator on The Tonight Show was a very bright young man named Dick Cavett. His favorite guest to book on the show in those days was an up-and-coming comedian named Woody Allen. Jack didn’t understand Woody’s humor because it was so different from and edgier than his own, but Fred and I loved his material because it was so fresh and different. Woody also told us a story that has stuck with me. He was writing for comedian Garry Moore and making fifteen hundred dollars a week. Garry was very social and liked to have his writers over to his house on Sundays for barbecues. But Woody refused to go, so Garry fired him. I was amazed that Woody wouldn’t just grin and bear the barbecue, especially for a job that paid fifteen hundred dollars a week. But socializing just wasn’t Woody’s favorite thing to do, and he was willing to be unemployed to avoid it. Woody had no wife or children at the time. I felt conflicted. I admired Woody on the one hand for standing up for what he believed in. But on the other hand, I knew when I got to be a husband and father, I would go to every barbecue I was invited to just to keep my job.
The longer we wrote for The Tonight Show, the more comedians we met. Often they would ask us to write for them, too. The other guest hosts on The Tonight Show, such as Sam Levenson and Hugh Downs, were not as quick as Joey. So sometimes we would stand to the side of the desk off-camera and feed the guest host jokes about products and toys he was riffing on. Fred and I learned immediately that it was an asset to master the art of writing under pressure.
When we told our friends we were writing for The Tonight Show, they were all very impressed. Only on Friday night the writer’s credit would roll across the screen and my parents would stay up to watch it. To get an on-screen credit for a job I loved doing seemed thrilling.
Just to be on the safe side, I kept my job as a copyboy at the Daily News. I wanted to have something to fall back on if we lost our Tonight Show gig. However, when Jack Paar found out that I was also working for the newspaper, he worried I might be a news spy plotting to expose the show’s secrets. The truth was, the only time I got a byline was in a story about a stamp collector. Eventually the paper raised my salary from thirty-eight dollars a week to forty-five where I worked eight hours. A forty-five-dollar-a-week job as copyboy and freelance writer didn’t compare to the four hundred dollars a week I had worked my way up to on The Tonight Show. So I quit the News.
I honestly thought The Tonight Show gig was the best job in the entire world, and I wanted to do it forever. Fred, however, seemed unsatisfied. He liked writing jokes, but he had dreams of bigger things. He talked about writing plays and books and material more erudite than television.
Fred’s ambition and passion for something other than The Tonight Show skits convinced me it was time to seek something else, too. That’s how we decided to take a job in Miami Beach one winter writing for comedian Alan Gale. It paid great money, and we liked the idea of leaving New York to spend some time in Florida. Alan had a revue that included other celebrities. It was a growing experience for us because they wanted a different, esoteric type of humor. For example, comedian Arthur Treacher had a line in the show that went “I got up this morning and my mouth tasted like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, after a heavy rain.” I liked that type of writing, which used obscure images, and I tried to duplicate it.
My Happy Days in Hollywood Page 5
